Last autumn, I was with a friend of mine roaming the lanes of Lumbini, the holy birth-place of Buddha. As I myself come from this place, I call round to my village every year before Xmas. This time Steve was with me. He is from Lyon, France. For some obscure reason Steve has taken up with Buddhism. He meditates, performs yoga, chants arcane mantra, follow some weird rituals, and walks on naked feet on the premises of the holy soil. He hasn’t shaved his head, though, nor does he hang the purple robe on him. To me, he appears to be a Buddhist on the inside and not on the outside. There must be a secret motivation at work. As he was engrossed in a conversation with a Vietnamese monk, I stuck around for him. It was right then some words came flying into my ear from afar, drifting from over the bushes only to arouse my curiosity.  I craned my neck to see who it were and there were these two westerners lazing by the pavement of a temple, tossing scraps of food at flock of doves while shooting the breeze.

This piece of writing, for the most part, is informed and influenced by their conversation.

I have hit a problem. I’ve lost faith in Buddhism. It can’t be a right path for someone who walks the planet earth to know the reason and purpose of existence. I no longer believe that the path helps you find a way to Nirvana. It is far from it. I followed it this long, observed the rule abiding by its principles, made sacrifices, devoured all sacred texts, read Bar-Do, ransacked the archive, left no stone unturned, roamed the monasteries of Tibet,  knocked about with the monks in Lumbini, took myself off to places like Dharmashala, Bodhgaya and Sarnath.

You know what they all put into my begging bowl! Misery!

My mom spent precious years of her life battling with cancer, confined to bed for a good many years, put through untold misery and suffering, only to lose the battle at the end. I shot my bolt. Her medical bills dug deep into my pocket down to few hundred dollars. My son, can’t think what came over him, ran away from school, got into the habit of doing drugs.  He fell into ruin. My sweet wife didn’t have a tower of strength all these years I spent kicking around the monasteries ran off with a dirty pedophile now serving time. She made the bed and she must lie in it. I don’t shed tears for her.

I was at the end of my rope and saw Buddhism as a refuge. It was not to be. I have now reached the end of the road and find myself so lonely and so forlorn.  Where do I go from here! I was born to Christian parents, went to a seminary to grant the dearest wish of my grandfather. I eternally felt a vacuum inside. There must be a sense of purpose in my life but no matter which way and how far I bent my mind I didn’t get anywhere near it. I found the faith I was born in of not much use in finding that purpose. I switched to Buddhism in hope that it would enlighten me and free me from the want of everything. It turned out that I was chasing a mirage.

Yeah, but why not you get away from it all and just move on! If this faith doesn’t help you in finding the purpose, I see no point in going with it. Faith or no faith, you exist. Your existence is not something that is born of your faith. It is rather the other way round. Even if they strip you of everything you own and things that you pride yourself on, you still exist. You don’t climb the top of a tower and jump to your death just because there is no faith for you to adhere to! You got to go on like the wind and the water. You are here to serve the purpose of living and serve the purpose of dying! Don’t look for a purpose in between! If there is any purpose at all, that is this. No faith can help you escape it, no matter how mystical, spiritual and transcendental they may be! You are a part of nature or universe and the birth, life, death and decay or just intrinsic to it. The thing that you call faith is nothing but something issued from human mind. The tricky part of the whole thing is that we are all born in faith and not outside the faith. And then, this faith puts the thing called reason and purpose in our head. We don’t take it. We fight it. We chose our head for the battle ground. We just can’t pluck it from our head and throw it away. The very thought of doing this fills us with dread. We go east and west, north and south hankering after a purpose so as to knock the previous purpose off our head. We need a purpose no matter what! We can’t live without a purpose! We were certainly not born this way but have been made to live this way.

My feet can’t carry my load. I am not that light now as I used to be. I am loaded. I need a crutch to lean on to walk my way back.

Are you trying to say that you need some other faith to lean on? Perhaps, yes. I need them to take loads off me. I was blind and someone led me down the road. I found it that I was walking the wrong road. Now, I need someone to take me back.

I can see a point in what you say. But then, purpose is like crack. Once you are addicted to it, it is not easy to go off it. It is hammered into us that there’s a reason behind everything. And the whole existence goes the cause and effect way. I being the part of the whole thing cannot be different from others. There must be some secret somewhere to crack the code. May be I was barking the wrong tree. I must find it. I must find the reason and the purpose of my existence.

As I have no one to look out for, there’s no going back. I think I should take myself off to the Himalayan wilderness. Who knows, maybe one day I stumble over something or someone that reveals the secret behind the existence.

Nothing wrong in trying out. Best of luck!

Steve breezed in and we moved. The Vietnamese monk turned around to give him a serene smile. Steve waved a hand as we walked off.